Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 203

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Small Fry: A Memoir," by Lisa Brennan Jobs.



By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved thirteen times. We rented spaces informally, staying in a friend’s furnished bedroom here, a temporary sublet there. The last place had become unsuitable when someone had sold the refrigerator without warning. The next day, my mother called my father, asked for more money, and he increased the child support payments by two hundred dollars per month. 

In 1980, when I was two, the district attorney of San Mateo County, California, sued my father for child-support payments. The state wanted him to pay child support and also to reimburse the state for the welfare payments already made. The lawsuit, initiated by the State of California, was made on my mother’s behalf. My father responded by denying paternity, swearing in a deposition that he was sterile and naming another man he said was my father. After this man’s dental and medical records were subpoenaed and didn’t match, his lawyers claimed that “between August, 1977, and the beginning of January, 1978, plaintiff engaged in acts of sexual intercourse with a certain person or persons, the names of whom the defendant is ignorant, but plaintiff well knows.”

The case was finalized on December 8, 1980, with my father’s lawyers insistent to close, and my mother unaware of why the case that had dragged on for months was now being rushed to a conclusion. Four days later Apple went public and overnight my father was worth more than two hundred million dollars. 

But before that, just after the court case was finalized, my father came to visit me once at our house on Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park, where we rented a detached studio. I don’t remember the visit, but it was the first time I’d seen him since I’d been a newborn in Oregon. 

“You know who I am?” he asked. He flipped his hair out of his eyes. 

I was two and a half; I didn’t. 

“I’m your father.” (“Like he was Darth Vader,” my mother said later, when she told me the story.) 

“I’m one of the most important people you will ever know,” he said.

“How much money does he have?” I asked my mother a couple years later. “See that?” My mother pointed to a ripped bit of white paper the size of a pencil eraser. “That’s what we have. And see that?” she said, pointing to a whole roll of white kraft paper. “That’s what he has.”

Later my mother said that it was the dips in his worldly success that made him come and find us. The pattern she saw was that when he failed at work, when he lost something in the public sphere, he remembered us, started dropping by, wanted a relationship with me. As if in the flurry of work he forgot me and remembered only when the flurry stopped.

My parents took LSD together. His first time, not hers. The drug took a while to kick in, she said, so you just waited around and then at some point you realized the world wasn’t normal anymore and the trip had started. The idea of my mother doing drugs made me squirm, but she said, “Don’t worry, Lisa. It was just a time—a different era.” She said he was terrified of making a fool of himself on drugs, and made her promise to tell him to snap out of it, in case he got weird. That was around the time my father told my mother he’d get famous and rich one day and lose himself in the world. “What do you mean, ‘lose himself’?” I asked her. I pictured him confused in the middle of a crowd. “I mean, lose his moral compass,” she said. “Trade his character, his soul, for power, for money, for worldly gain. Contort himself. Lose the connection to his soul.”

He called me Small Fry. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast. We’re livin’ on borrowed time.” I assumed small fry meant the kind of french fries left at the bottom of the bag, cold and crusty; I thought he was calling me a runt, or misbegotten. Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.

After they put my brother to sleep, my father would come down to his office to work for a few hours. Sitting at my desk, I could hear when he left his office again to go up to bed. I listened to his feet on the tile as he turned left at the staircase and went upstairs. It would have been easy for him to walk a few more steps, duck his head into my room, and say goodnight. But I was fourteen, too old to need a goodnight. My mother had always done so, a part of our pattern that was, I thought, infantilizing, and that I could have done without. Here I burned for it. 

What did I want? What did I expect? He didn’t need me the way I needed him. A dark and frightening loneliness came over me, a sharp pain beneath my ribs. I cried myself to sleep, the tears turning cold and pooling in my ears.

Like me, most of the women I knew did not have fathers when they were growing up: fathers died, divorced, or left. Not having a father wasn’t unique, or even significant. My father’s significance was elsewhere. Instead of raising me, he was inventing world-changing machines; he was famous, mingling, accruing, driving stoned in the South of France with a billionaire named Pigozzi, dating Joan Baez. I figured no one would think, Hey, that guy should have been raising his daughter instead. What presumption. To whatever degree I felt grieved by having lost him for so long, and to whatever extent this grief arose powerfully in me, I suppressed it, or was not fully aware of it: it was wrong, selfish; I was nothing. I dismissed the fact of my own importance to him, his importance to me, or even the importance of fathers and children more generally—a dismissal so familiar to me then that I didn’t even notice it: it was part of the air.